


Ghost House

by alpacasandravens



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Family Bonding, Fluff, Gen, Mystery, Nina-centric, Plot, miss peregrine's au, mutants are peculiars, tags to be updated as i post chapters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:01:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26759131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpacasandravens/pseuds/alpacasandravens
Summary: Nina and Magda survived the events of Apocalypse, but Erik still left. Now, Nina is a teenager, and she's just gotten a cryptic letter from her father - but when she follows the letter's instructions and arrives in Westchester, all that's waiting for her is a ruined old house.Or, a Miss Peregrine's AU where the X-Men (and Magneto) live in a Loop. No knowledge of the Miss Peregrine's series necessary for this fic.
Relationships: Nina Gurzsky & Erik Lehnsherr, Nina Gurzsky & Pietro Maximoff
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The first chapter of this fic takes place in Poland, so even though it is written entirely in English, the characters should be speaking Polish. I, however, am American and have never been to Poland, so I apologize for the inaccuracies you will doubtless find. 
> 
> This fic was inspired by me waking up at 2am last night thinking about X-Men with the first stanza of Robert Frost's "Ghost House" on loop in my mind. Not at all necessary for the fic, but if you want to check it out, the poem is [here.](https://poets.org/poem/ghost-house)

Nina was, for all intents and purposes, a pretty normal kid with a pretty normal life. She was of average height, possibly a little shorter. Her hair was an unimpressive color of brown cut to an indeterminate length, and was nearly always pulled back in a ponytail or under a hat. A few freckles spotted her cheeks, but not enough to be really noticeable. She got up, went to school, and got Bs in most of her classes. After school, she walked the neighbors’ dogs, and on the weekends, she volunteered at the local animal shelter. Both of these jobs were made significantly easier by the one abnormal thing about Nina - that she could communicate with animals. 

It had always struck Nina as odd that being able to talk to animals made her weird. After all, there had never been a time in her life that she hadn’t been able to do it. Weren’t everyone else the weird ones, only able to communicate in one or two languages, to one species? 

No one else saw it that way. Though it had been twelve years, Nina can still feel the arrow in her back like she had been shot yesterday. 

The men had come to their house after dinner. Nina had been in the garden while her parents washed the dishes, playing with her friends. Not human friends, of course - she hadn’t been old enough to attend school yet, and her parents had been reclusive people. Nina laughed as three cardinals acted out a skit of drama and intrigue. A baby deer nudged her arm with its soft nose and said “Come on, there’s a clearing only a little ways away with the prettiest flowers.” 

“Maybe tomorrow,” Nina told the deer. “It’s getting dark.” 

The sun had gone down, but the gray light of evening was still present. If their house had not been so deep into the forest, Nina might have been able to see the last vestiges of pink in the sky, but as it was the tall trees blocked out the horizon. 

“Tomorrow?” the fawn said, lying down next to Nina and laying its head on her foot. 

“Of course!”

Then from the driveway came the cry of “Mutant!” yelled in a dozen different voices made the same by the hate that flowed through them. They grabbed her and dragged her into the woods, and an hour later, she lay with an arrow in her back on the leaf-littered ground while her father, his hands bloodless, murdered twelve men. 

Still, it has been a long time since then. Her father is gone and she and her mother moved, to a new town in another part of Poland where no one would know what happened to them. Nina knows better, now, than to tell anyone about her non-human friends, or to talk to the birds where anyone can see. She can get away with talking to dogs, though. Everyone does that. They just can’t understand when the dogs talk back.

She pulled on the leash of one of the dogs she was walking. A mutt that looked like it probably had some Golden Retriever in it, this dog belonged to a young couple that lived three doors down. His name was officially Rover, but he had always tried to get Nina to call him Supreme Ruler Of All Dogs. 

“Can we go now?” Nina asked irritably. A light drizzle was starting to fall, and she was still several blocks from home. 

Rover looked up at her. “I’m exploring.”

“You’ve been sniffing the same pile of shit for five minutes,” Nina huffed. “We’re going home now.” 

Rover ignored her and lifted his leg to piss. 

“Typical.” 

The drizzle settled onto her bare arms and began to soak her hat (a faded brown cap that read “Save the Whales”). 

“If you don’t hurry up, I’ll snap your Achilles tendon like a twig,” yapped Princess, a miniature poodle belonging to an elderly man in the ground-floor apartment of the duplex where Nina lived. Nina had no doubt she would; she knew firsthand how sharp Princess’s teeth were.

Rover mumbled something Nina had no doubt was very rude under his breath, but did stop sniffing the pile of what she suspected was old deer shit. 

The rain turned into a downpour right after Nina dropped the last of her charges, an arthritic old Great Dane, off at his home. She pulled her hat down over her head and sprinted down the block, arriving at her front door dripping wet. 

Nina closed the door behind her, kicking off her shoes by the door and shrugging off her now-soaked flannel. Draping it over the radiator to dry, she pulled on an old hoodie. “1991 Regional Cross-Country Champions,” it read in peeling white letters. The pocket was starting to come unsewn, and as Nina pushed up the sleeves to her elbows, the little hole in the left cuff became visible. 

“Nina? Is that you?” her mother called from the kitchen. 

“Yeah.” It was five-thirty on a Tuesday. In an hour, Nina would help her mother cook, and they would sit on their couch and try to guess the Jeopardy! answers - made more difficult because many of the questions were specific to America and her mother’s English was somewhat rusty. 

When Nina rounded the corner to the kitchen, she could tell none of that would be happening tonight. Her mother, usually calm and perfectly put-together, was pacing in a circle. Her dark hair was a tangled mess from repeatedly running her hands through it, and there was a deep fear in her eyes that Nina hadn’t seen since the day she was shot. 

“We should pack, just in case,” her mother said, still pacing. 

“What?”

Her mother stopped. “Three days ago. Josef Wozniak. And now this.” 

“Mom, what’s going on?” Nina had never seen her mother like this. It was like all of the happiness that usually filled her had been drained out and replaced with the stress and fear she kept at bay. “You’re freaking me out.”

“Three days ago, only thirty miles from here, a man named Josef Wozniak was seen using mutant abilities to water his lawn. The next morning, he was found dead. And today, I got a letter from your father.” 

She shoved a piece of paper at Nina with shaking hands. Three crease marks crossed the paper, evidence it had been folded and re-folded at least once. On it, in blue pen in scratchy, sharp handwriting, were the words:

_ Magda, _

_ It’s happening again. Nina’s not safe.  _

_ I told you nothing more would happen to you when I left. I wish that had been the case. But we can protect Nina.  _

_ 1407 Graymalkin Lane, Westchester.  _

_ I’m sorry.  _

Nina dropped the piece of paper on the floor. Her eyes met her mother’s, and though she had so many questions, her mouth hung open uselessly.

The next day, Nina practically sprinted to the library during lunch, shoving her sandwich in her mouth in just three bites on her way there. The library didn’t have internet (nothing did, in this section of the country, rural areas were always the last to get technology), but it did have newspaper archives, and Nina was curious. 

The first thing she looked up was the letter’s postmark. “Westchester, NY.” She didn’t find much, only a dot to represent the town on the library’s world atlas. She tried to look for maps of the town; unsurprisingly, a library on a different continent didn’t have maps of a smallish town thousands of miles away. Newspapers were similarly difficult to come by.

At the end of her lunch period, Nina found herself where, if she was honest with herself, she knew she would be: pored over the library’s newspaper archives, flipped to a town on the other side of Poland, with a date of twelve years ago. 

LOCAL WORKER REVEALED TO BE WANTED TERRORIST,

The headline reads. Nina knows this article. She’s read it so many times that it’s practically imprinted on her brain. It’s been years since the last time she looked at it, but then, it’s been years since the last time her mother mentioned her father. 

“Seven employees of the Czersk Steelworks Factory and five police officers are dead this morning after a confrontation with a man believed to be so-called “supervillain” Erik Lehnsherr, aka Magneto.” 

That’s not how Nina remembered it. She remembered her father, terrified. Her mother, crying. And twelve men with wooden bows saying they were going to make her father pay. 

To this day, Nina doesn’t know what her father did. She tried to look it up once, when she was thirteen. She made it to a copy of the 1973 Washington Post, headlined 

MUTANT TERRORIST ATTEMPTS ASSASSINATION, FOILED BY MUTANT HERO.

Below that, a grainy, black and white picture of her father, flying several feet off the ground, explosions behind him, next to a photo of a woman with scales holding a plastic gun defending a man in a suit. She had run out of the library, leaving the newspaper on the table. 

All she knows is her mother’s insistence that her father was not a bad man and her few memories of him - laughing in delight when she showed him her new friends, the butterflies; reading her a bedtime story every night and singing her a lullaby in a low, rumbling voice when she was sick - didn’t match the headlines.

After school, Nina walked the dogs again. She was distracted, and they can tell.

“Hey, kid,” rumbled Sammy, the Great Dane, “are you feeling all right?”

Nina had long since accepted Sammy’s insistence on calling her ‘kid’ - despite the fact that technically, he was younger than her, in dog years, he was definitely ancient. “Stressed,” she admitted.

“School getting you down again?” 

“Family stuff.” Nina had begun her career in dog-walking with Sammy four years ago, and the dog had heard her complaints about nearly everything in that time. 

Sammy did not respond, only huffed in understanding. 

“Do you know what’s getting me down?” Princess asked in a manner that meant they would all be hearing about it no matter what they said. “These puddles. They’re so icky and dirty, and they’re getting my fur all wet.” 

“If you don’t want to get wet, you could walk around the puddles,” Nina observed.

“On the grass?” Princess was horrified. 

Puppy, a mischievous Jack Russel far too old to go by that name, pushed Princess into the grass. 

“Not again,” Nina sighed as the angry barking started up. 

“Tell me about my father,” Nina said as she dropped her backpack on the floor by the couch. She could see the partially packed suitcase on her mother’s bed, but pretended she couldn’t. 

Her mother sighed. She was tired, the fear and panic of yesterday drained into a deep exhaustion. “What do you want to know?”

‘Everything’ felt like much too large of a question. She couldn’t expect her mother to sit here and tell her every single thing about her father, and she wasn’t sure she wanted her to. “Why would he write to us?” she asked instead.

“He believes we’re in danger.” 

“Is he right?”

Her mother thought for a moment. “Probably. Yes.”

“Do you trust him?” 

“I trust him on this.”

Nina sat down on the couch next to her mother. “But not generally?”

“Your father…” her mother trailed off for a moment, thinking. She pushed a piece of hair back behind her ear and, like that action had been some sort of reset button, began again. “I trust your father to always do what he thinks is right, and I believe he and I agree on this.”

“On what?” 

Nina knew what her mother would say. She could still see the suitcase, and she remembered her mother’s fear, the feeling of the arrow in her back. The way her mother had picked up the letter Nina dropped yesterday. 

Nina’s mother smiled thinly, the kind of smile adults use to promise that everything will be okay when they can barely convince themselves of that. “Keeping you safe,” she said. “We’re going to New York in the morning.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know none of yall went and read Ghost House. But it's ok.
> 
> _I dwell in a lonely house I know / That vanished many a summer ago_

“Where are we going?” Nina asked. 

Her mother closed the taxi’s trunk. Inside was only a single suitcase for the both of them as well as Nina’s backpack. There had barely been any time to pack, and Nina had no idea what she was supposed to take, because aside from the cryptic address, she still had no idea where they were off to. 

“To see your father,” her mother said, lips pressed together in a tight line. 

“In New York, yeah, I know. But where even is this address he sent us?” 

Nina’s mother said nothing. She slid into the backseat of the taxi and closed the door behind her. Grumbling to herself, Nina entered on the other side. 

Airplanes were, Nina thought, absolutely terrifying. She didn’t like the city, where the only animals were the pigeons that cried out for bread and the worms that oozed across the sidewalk. She didn’t like the airport, where the people walked around in outfits that seemed to be half formal wear, half pajamas. It was like another time, one where the only distinction from the monotony were the occasional announcements of a flight’s arrival or departure. And she hated the plane, the tiny metal cage that would take her much higher than she had ever intended to be in her life. 

Still, she gazed out the window of seat 24F as the ground dropped away beneath her, and if she was gripping her mother’s arm so hard she was sure there would be fingernail marks beneath her mother’s sweater, what of it?

She watched as Poland sped away beneath them, then Germany, and then a vast expanse of blue. She’d never been out of the country before, and had never dreamed she would leave Europe. 

“What’s he doing in America?” Nina asked.

There was a silence in which her mother decided how much of the truth to tell. 

“If the address takes us where I expect? Staying with a friend.”

“What friend?” Nina was well aware she sounded like a small child, constantly asking questions. She did not care. 

“A very old one.”

Her mother said nothing more, closing her eyes in the imitation of sleep. She was not asleep; Nina thought it would be a miracle if anyone could sleep through the cries of the currently very upset baby a row or two ahead of them. She sighed and returned to gazing at the clouds below them, scudding across the blue of the Atlantic. 

There were significantly more animals in the airport when Nina exited the plane than when she had boarded. Her mother practically hovered over her shoulder as they walked, weaving through a thick crowd of the loudest people on the planet. The New York airport was full of bright colors, eye-catching storefronts, and women who seemed to have small dogs in their purses. 

“I’m flying!” A chihuahua yipped as it stuck its head over the side of a very pink tote. 

Nina winced. 

Her mother steered them through the airport, one hand on the top of Nina’s backpack to prevent them from getting separated. 

“Do you think the danger is going to find us in the airport?” Nina asked, irritated, when her mother practically yanked the backpack off of her by stopping abruptly and not letting go. 

Her mother, who had just needed to readjust the way she was carrying their suitcase, said “I’d prefer not to find out.” 

“What is the danger?” Nina asked as they took a shockingly expensive cab to the town of Westchester. “Am I going to get shot again?”

Nina very much did not want to get shot again. Once was enough. It had taken her weeks to be able to sit up and walk properly after having an arrow in her back, and months to not flinch around policemen. After all, they had shot her. She still had trouble even seeing bows.

“No.” Her mother took her hand and squeezed it, a reassurance. “Not if I can do anything about it.”

“But it has to be bad, right? For him to bring us here?” Nina asked in a hushed voice. She thought the cab driver probably couldn’t hear her; she didn’t want to risk it. 

Her mother took a deep breath, grounding herself. “Yes, sweetheart. I think so.”

***

1407 Graymalkin Lane did not look like anywhere a letter could be sent from. In point of fact, it did not look habitable.

On the grounds that she refused to invite herself over to someone’s house, even if that someone had sent a cryptic note with that house’s address, Nina and her mother rented the closest hotel room they could afford, but that was still an hour’s walk from the property. Apparently her father, or her father’s friend, lived in a very rich neighborhood, if the hotel prices were anything to judge by. If he had money, he could have at least sent them some, Nina thought. She didn’t mind walking dogs, but having a job at fourteen hadn’t done wonders for her social life or her grades. 

That thought flew out of her mind when she arrived at Graymalkin Lane. A gate at the end of the road bore the numbers 1407 in weathered bronze just below a sign for the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning. Several letters were missing, and someone had embellished the gate with an anti-mutant slur in red spray paint. 

The gate itself hung slightly open, creaking softly in the wind. Beyond it, all Nina could see was a driveway, pavement bleached in the sun and cracked with grass and weeds. 

“This can’t be the right place,” Magda said, squinting at the gate’s number like it might suddenly change to reveal 1407 Graymalkin Lane was one of the other houses on the street, the kept-up, respectable, and obviously lived-in ones. 

Nina said nothing. She wanted to know so much. Why her father sent them a letter after all this time, why he told them to come here. What had happened to this place. She looked around, trying to find a bird or a squirrel she could ask, but saw nothing. It wasn’t just humans that had abandoned this place. 

“We should go,” her mother said quietly, turning to leave. 

Nina crossed her arms. “We came all the way here,” she said. “We can’t leave without at least seeing the place.”

This was, she thought, very solid logic. They had not flown to the United States from Poland, shelled out for that taxi, and walked over an hour just to turn around at the first sign of defeat. Admittedly, she could think of no reason why her father would be here. The man she remembered would never live behind a gate that said something so derogatory. But he had sent that letter, she was sure of it. 

“Five minutes,” her mother said. “Then we leave.” 

Before she had finished speaking, Nina was through the gate. 

The driveway on the other side of the gate seemed to stretch for miles. Briefly, the thought flashed through Nina’s mind that she could walk on this road for her allotted five minutes and not even catch sight of the house. She crossed her arms and picked up the pace. 

On either side of the driveway were fields that could no longer be described as a lawn. They stretched seemingly endlessly in either direction, and clearly hadn’t been mowed in several years. Small trees stuck up at random from the tall grass and clusters of purple and yellow flowers bloomed on the side of the road. Nina thought she hadn’t been somewhere this empty in a long time.

The air, too, was still. The wind that had troubled them on the other side of the gate had died down, and if the sun had been out, Nina would have been sweating in the thick summer air. No birds chirped in any of the trees or shrubs, and she didn’t have to swat a single gnat away from her bare arms. 

A solitary rabbit hopped across the road. “What are you?” it asked, eyes wide. 

“Human,” Nina replied. The rabbit let out a noise of confusion and hopped back into the grass. 

Nina’s speed had left her mother far behind her by the time she finally found the end of the road. The pavement curled into a circle, wrapping around a metal sculpture of an X inside a circle. Nina knew that symbol, had seen it displayed on telecasts when she was a kid and in less reputable documentaries more recently. 

The symbol of the X-Men was rusted and overgrown, vines climbing up its surface and twisting through it as though nature was intent to forget it had ever been there. The building behind it, too, was slowly disappearing. It had once been beautiful, but its facade was crumbling. Windows were empty holes filled with jagged shards, the rest of the glass twinkling dangerously on the ground. The front door hung open, hinges straining to stay attached to the doorframe. 

“What happened to this place?” Nina whispered.

Behind her, her mother had caught up. She stood in the overgrown flower bed in the center of the drive, fingers trailing over the rusted X sculpture. 

“We should go.” 

Nina turned around, her mother had spoken so softly that she could barely hear her. Even the light breeze through the ivy that threatened to cover the walls was almost enough to drown her out.

“What? Why?”

It’s been well over five minutes, time spent staring in a kind of melancholy awe at the ruined 1407 Graymalkin Lane. There is no reason to stay, Nina knows. No one could live here. But she wants, with a ferocious desire deep in her heart, to know more. It’s as though, if she spent enough time here, if she searched every room and mapped every corridor into her brain, she could understand. 

She wasn’t sure what she was trying to understand - her father? Herself? 

“There’s nothing here. I don’t know why your father told us to come here, but he was wrong.”

Looking up at the looming facade of the empty house, Nina didn’t think he was. Standing here, she felt for the first time that danger her father had mentioned, and some part of her knew he had been right.

Nina’s mother crossed her arms across her chest. It wasn’t a defiant gesture, she looked almost as though she were holding herself together. “Let’s go.”

Nina didn’t argue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that was a super short chapter but i have been swamped by uni and work and lack of motivation so once again no promises when the next chapter will come out. but i am very excited to write it.

**Author's Note:**

> I will post more chapters as I write them! I'm excited for this fic, but I can't promise fast update speeds, because of college and work and life generally. Comments do make me write faster though ;)


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